Strike bans may push binding arbitration

Critics see union ploy in post-BART proposals

A man enters the Lake Merritt BART station Monday, Oct. 14, 2013, in Oakland, Calif. San Francisco Bay Area rapid trains are running Monday morning after the transit agency and two of its largest unions agreed to extend contract talks over the weekend to avoid a strike. Tense negotiations ended around 3 a.m. after the unions gave a 24-hour reprieve from a planned midnight Sunday strike. Representatives of Bay Area Rapid Transit leaders and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 and the Service
— AP

A man enters the Lake Merritt BART station Monday, Oct. 14, 2013, in Oakland, Calif. San Francisco Bay Area rapid trains are running Monday morning after the transit agency and two of its largest unions agreed to extend contract talks over the weekend to avoid a strike. Tense negotiations ended around 3 a.m. after the unions gave a 24-hour reprieve from a planned midnight Sunday strike. Representatives of Bay Area Rapid Transit leaders and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 and the Service
/ AP

SACRAMENTO  The short-lived second strike by BART workers is over, and many California politicians – including some who are closely aligned with public-sector unions – are calling for legislation that would ban future transit strikes in the state.

The proposal is ostensibly a rebuke to the unions and a boon to hard-pressed Bay Area commuters who found their lives disrupted. But some rail experts say it may actually be a Trojan Horse to help unions get a permanent leg up in future negotiations.

“They want binding arbitration,” Wendell Cox, a St. Louis-based transportation consultant and former member of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, told me. “Normally, unions ‘grudgingly’ give up the right to strike in order to get binding arbitration.”

In that process, unions and management take their case to a third-party mediator and must abide by the mediator’s decision. Some police unions have secured that contract provision, but it is not common in transit, or most other, agencies. Unions usually favor binding arbitration because it creates a one-way ratchet for compensation hikes.

For instance, an agency might offer a 1 percent raise and then the unions come back and ask for 20 percent – and the arbitrator comes back somewhere in the middle.

“Like Pilate, all duly elected and appointed public officials in public sector bargaining communities can wash their hands of responsibility,” the late Detroit Mayor Coleman Young wrote in 1981. Even this union ally regretted this move. “They can even put on a show of resisting union demands now and then, knowing that private arbitrators, who make a living by pleasing unions, will grant what the politicians denied.”

That’s perhaps why BART workers insisted on arbitration to battle the agency’s plan to streamline work rules. The left-leaning Daily Kos Web site argued: “Management is spinning furiously, trying to make this look like the unions’ fault, but when one side is willing to go to a neutral party for resolution and the other isn’t … well, you do the math.” But unions probably viewed it as the best means to get what they wanted.

State Assembly candidate Steve Glazer, an East Bay Democrat and advisor to the governor, has been circulating petitions calling for a ban on transit strikes, reported the San Jose Mercury News. The details of the ban are unclear, but leading Sacramento Democrats want a binding-arbitration clause to be part of any such measure.

Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, says that he likes the plan advanced by William B. Gould, a Stanford professor and former National Labor Relations Board chairman during the Clinton administration. In a recent column, Gould called for a ban on transit strikes coupled with an arbitration clause by which “the arbitrator must be allowed only to select the final position of one side or the other.”

Republicans have also jumped on the no-strike idea. “We will soon announce a new proposal to ban transit strikes in California,” the GOP senate and assembly leadership announced in a Tuesday statement. Republican officials told me that they would not support any bill, however, that included a binding-arbitration provision.

It’s easy to understand why legislators of both parties want to protect transit riders from disruptive strikes – but any “no strike” bill that includes a binding-arbitration requirement could cause more problems than it solves.